Paranoia can be dangerous (6/29/05)

Paranoia is contagious. Then again, if there’s real reason to be concerned, maybe it’s not paranoia after all.

I contracted my first case over the past few weeks. You be the judge as to whether it was justified or not.

It started in Warsaw, Poland, where I was conducting a seminar for a group of Belarusian newspaper people on behalf of the International Center for Journalists. The plan was that we’d do a week-long session in Warsaw, then I’d take the train with some of the participants back to Belarus and do some follow-up work.

The first seeds of anxiety were planted about the second or third day of the seminar.

“Jack,” one of the Belarusians would ask me, “are you having second thoughts about visiting our country?’

I’d assure them I wasn’t, that my only real concern was whether the authorities would let me in.

But after about the third time someone asks you that question, your self-assurance begins to erode.

Then, about a day later, a representative from the Belarusian Association of Journalists, asked me if I’d considered hiring a bodyguard for my stay in his country. I laughed, and most of the other seminar participants scoffed. But the point was made.

A few nights later, one of the participants, who’d had a few drinks, wondered aloud, “Three or five? What do you think?”

Three or five what, I wondered.

“Seminar participants who are KGB,” he answered, with a knowing nod. “I think three. Maybe five.”

By now, the seeds were beginning to take root and we hadn’t even left Poland.

Things didn’t get much better on the long train ride from Warsaw to Minsk. One of the participants with whom I was sharing a sleeping compartment suggested that all of us in the compartment should pretend not to know one another and said that under no circumstances should we mention the seminar. She was deadly serious, but cooler heads talked her out of the scheme. It was easier just to tell the truth.

Fortunately, the border crossing went smoothly. But other little indicators kept popping up.

First of all, there was the matter of my hotel. The organization which invited me to Belarus couldn’t book a room directly because it’s been blacklisted; it was necessary to use a go-between agent, and payment had to be in cash in a car in the parking lot instead of at the hotel’s registration desk.

Then another seminar participant suggested that my friend who had been wondering “three or five” was perhaps himself a KGB agent.

As I said, it’s contagious.

Things went more smoothly on the road as I traveled to individual newspapers in regional cities around the country, that is until I visited a newspaper that had been in serious hot water with the local authorities.

The visit was put together at the last minute, with less than 24 hours notice. But by the time I arrived, the authorities had come up with an excuse to take the editor out of his office for the day so we couldn’t meet face-to-face. Then, 45 minutes into a meeting with his assistant, we were joined by the immigration authorities.

They’d had a call, they said, that there was a foreigner without proper registration present. That would be me.

They were right. Under the country’s complicated immigration rules, my registration expired that night and needed renewal. I promised it would be taken care of.

When my translator and I left, we learned that our driver had been visited by the highway police, who had gone through all of his documentation at the same time I was being hassled. In fact, the highway police were still parked behind us and followed us all the way out of town. There, at a checkpoint, we were pulled over.

This time, their excuse was a drug investigation. They’d had reports of a similar car being used to smuggle heroin, they insisted. So every suitcase and every briefcase had to be opened for a look.

As we drove away, an unmarked police car ostentatiously pulled out directly behind us. It stayed on our tail until we reached the “county line.”

An hour later, trying to straighten out my registration to satisfy the immigration authorities and being repeatedly told that I could be expelled from the country, I was getting a little frazzled.

“It’s normal,” said my translator.

“Normal?” I asked.

“Normal,” he said.

I shook my head, trying to find some humor in a sometimes dark situation. “How do I know you’re not KGB?” I asked him.

He laughed. Impossible, he said. He was a third generation dissident. His grandfather had been in trouble with the Soviets for his writings and so had his father.

“I’m not convinced,” I said, laughing a paranoid laugh. “Sounds like the perfect cover to me.”[[In-content Ad]]